Tech

iPhone 5S Fingerprint Sensor Will Soon Have Competition

With the TouchID fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5S, Apple could break new ground in consumer electronics by taking biometric technology mainstream. In fact, industry experts agree that other manufacturers will soon follow suit with their own fingerprint scanners.

Built into the home button of the iPhone 5S, the Touch ID system scans the finger of the person pressing the home button. For the owner, the phone unlocks immediately — no lock code necessary. The system can also eliminate the need to enter a password when downloading new apps from the App Store.

During the keynote, Apple senior vice president of marketing Phil Schiller explained the fingerprint sensor in detail: "It's a touch-capacitive sensor. It's super-thin — it's 170 microns thin, that's just thicker than a human hair — yet it's very high resolution: 500 pixels per inch. You can turn your finger and read it in any orientation."

By building the sensor into the home button, the Touch ID sensor is arguably in the most convenient place possible. To protect the sensor, Apple improved the durability of the button with sapphire crystal, surrounding it with a steel ring that detects the finger.

Such convenient design might be a difficult thing for competitors like Samsung, whose phones have physical buttons of irregular shape and size, or BlackBerry, whose new phones don't have a home button. However, the feature is bound to be imitated, industry experts say.

"There's no question — since we're working with biometric providers — the other major mobile manufacturers already have products in the queue coming out," says Benjamin Chen, CEO of Arkami, which builds myIDkey, a USB thumb drive secured with biometrics. "Their number one competitor will have the model soon."

Chen wouldn't say who that was, but Apple's chief competitor in the smartphone space is generally regarded as Samsung.

"It's a pretty bold move. If Apple thinks enough of this technology to put it on their iPhone, it's going to be ubiquitous within a year. That'll drive down the cost."

How Touch ID Works

The Touch ID sensor essentially takes a picture of your fingertip. Apple says it gets better at reading your fingerprint every time you use it, and it can scan sub-epidermal layers of the skin to improve the resolution of the scan. The software categorizes the print in one of three well-established major categories: arch, loop or whorl.

A user can set up more than one finger in Touch ID, and — importantly — the prints are stored and encrypted on the iPhone A7 chip. Every time the sensor scans a finger, it compares the scan with the stored image, matching individual details that are "smaller than the human eye can see," Apple says.

Apple says it works no matter what the finger's orientation is, and to make it convenient, it will need to account for partial scans, Chen says.

"If you think about it, how much of your finger is passing over the camera lens? Most readers don't necessarily see the full finger. They might see a portion of the finger. But the portion is good enough because every finger is unique."

That 500 ppi statistic is actually a very important one, says Chen. It's the level of resolution that any fingerprint scanner needs to be considered for government use.

"That's an important bar," Chen says. "That is table stakes to play in the game. Older readers didn't have that resolution. A lot of the digital signal processing that went with those readers were less advanced at that time."

Are Fingerprints Secure?

The field of biometrics has been around for a long time, but apart from a few rarely used fingerprint readers in laptops, it's remained out of the mainstream. By acquiring AuthenTec and putting a fingerprint reader on its iconic smartphone, Apple has suddenly given a jolt to the technology — but is the world ready for it?

Biometric signatures aren't like passwords. That makes them more convenient, but it also brings with it new concerns about security and reliability. After all, customers usually own a smartphone for at least 18 months. Will the sensor still work properly after all that time?

"Up 'til now, [fingerprint readers] have been unreliable," says Flannery. "They get dirty, covered with oils from the finger over time, and you'd need to perform some maintenance. This is going to be an even more harsh environment since it's going to be in your pocket, you'll be spilling your breakfast on it — all sorts of things."

That's to say nothing of security concerns. The fingerprints are encrypted on the A7 chip, but every version of iOS has been jailbroken so far, and iOS isn't a malware-free platform. Apple appears to have rejected storing the fingerprints in the cloud, but it's unclear if it was for reasons of convenience (you would still need a lock code when offline) or customer paranoia (witness the spate of recent stories about the NSA).

"If the [fingerprints] could get hijacked, it becomes serious," says Chen. "How well biometrics are protected as a standard hasn't really been documented. I think biometrics are a huge step forward for ease of use and making things more secure. But you can change your password, you can't change your fingerprint."

What's your take on the iPhone's fingerprint scanner? Let us know in the comments.

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